The COVID-19 pandemic is probably the deadliest disaster in Wales in living memory.

Up to the end of 2025, Wales sadly lost almost 11,000 people as a direct result of the virus, and a further 2,500 people whose deaths involved but were not directly due to it, according to ONS data from death certificates. Most of these occurred in 2020 and 2021.

By the end of 2024, there had been 217 Covid-related deaths in Ceredigion, 497 in Powys, 326 in Gwynedd, 425 in Pembrokeshire and 834 in Carmarthenshire. Every community was hit.

Aside from the direct impacts of illness, death and disablement by the virus, we saw economic devastation, massive impacts on mental health and huge changes to our way of life, many of which remain to this day.

During the acute phase of the pandemic, Wales diverged considerably from England, especially from May 2020 onwards. We reopened more slowly here, had more cautious messaging and, with Boris Johnson in charge over the border, appeared to have more ‘competent’ leadership than our neighbours.

Despite this, Wales has one of the highest rates of COVID-19 deaths in Western Europe.

We’ve lost around 430 people in every 100,000, compared to around 370 in England, 360 in Scotland and 320 in Northern Ireland. Only one English region has a higher rate than Wales – the North East.

It is very easy to explain this as Wales having an older, sicker population, which is true to an extent, but isn’t the full story. Between March 2020 and April 2022, over 18,000 people caught Covid in Welsh hospitals. Around 2,500 of those sadly passed away.

In Welsh care homes, over 2,300 people died with COVID-19. Some caught Covid in the homes after untested patients were discharged into them from hospitals.

Some were let down by a lack of testing availability and outdated facilities. The authorities failed to acknowledge and treat the virus as an airborne threat, instead focusing on droplets and handwashing.

The Labour-run Welsh Government has so far resisted demands for a Wales-specific inquiry, insisting the UK inquiry is sufficient.

What has the UK inquiry found so far?

That the Welsh NHS came ‘close to collapse’ in December 2020. Wales’ recovery in NHS waiting times has been slower than England and Scotland. Welsh Ministers were ‘overly reliant’ on UK Government in early 2020, and the initial response was ‘inadequate’.

Wales made mistakes and decisions that other parts of the UK didn’t.

Remember during the period in November and December 2020 when indoor hospitality was allowed to open but arbitrarily couldn’t serve alcohol after 6pm? The local lockdowns in much of Wales in Autumn 2020? Waiting until we had the highest infection rate in the world to lock down in December 2020? The absurd situation in January 2022 when it was legal to watch a football match in a bar, but not to watch the match outside, where the risk of Covid spread was much lower? What about the brief spell in late 2021 when they brought in vaccine/test passports for some settings?

Were these effective? Were they proportionate? So many questions need answering.

The lack of accountability on the part of Welsh Ministers is appalling. They’ve consistently refused to commit to a proper review of their decisions, the Senedd committee formed to scrutinise the response collapsed last year without serving its purpose, and we can’t forget Vaughan Gething’s deleted messages.

Just recently, Mark Drakeford said he has ‘no regrets’ about his time in office. What a joke.

We owe it to the bereaved families to hold a full inquiry into the Welsh Covid response, and the new government that comes in next month should make it one of their first moves.

A government which uses devolved powers must be prepared to face its own scrutiny when it uses the powers it has. Otherwise, devolution is undermined from the outset.

When the next pandemic comes around, we need to make sure we can handle it properly. Or at least much better than we handled this.